That's Another Story: The Autobiography (10 page)

Grandma died in 1960. As she lay dying I would sit by her bed, in the little back bedroom of our house, and moisten her lips with a tiny brush dipped in water, fascinated once again by the transformation of her face, this time with an unrecognisable peace that softened her features, the old yellow tooth, unhampered by inhibition, clearly visible again at the centre of a half-smile, and I saw for the first time that there was beauty in her face.

I’m asked time and time again about why I choose to play people older than myself: Mrs Overall, or Robert Lindsay’s mother in
GBH
, or, more recently, Evie in the film
Driving Lessons
. I have always found other people endlessly intriguing, as all actors do. The way they think, the way they speak and move, their faces and clothes, and older people were - and are - even more interesting in some ways, simply because I haven’t reached their age and I want to go and explore it. But I believe the main reason that I end up playing so many older women is that somewhere I want to re-create and comprehend both the fun and the calamity that was caused by my grandmother’s presence in our house for what was actually almost the whole of my childhood years.

This conundrum was partly solved when I was involved in an
Omnibus
for BBC Television about my life and career. I went back to the West of Ireland in the mid-nineties, to the place where my mother was born. The single-storey, thatched cottage that she, her two brothers and sister had been brought up in had long since been demolished, but I spoke to the people who had lived next door to them. When I asked them about my grandmother, the woman they described came as a revelation to me. She was apparently lively, energetic and funny, loved by the local children and always welcoming with an apple to give them from the orchard. I was shocked, feeling both deprived of that woman that they had all known and saddened when I thought of the poor confused, cantankerous old woman I had grown up with. It made no sense to me and then I remembered the beauty of that face as she lay dying, with its secret smile, and somehow it did.

‘Now you’re a proper schoolgirl!’ I felt my stomach tighten. I was standing in the kitchen, wearing a white blouse, with a navy, silver and yellow tie under a navy-blue gymslip that almost reached my ankles and which my mother was about to pin up and hem. It would have been the beginning of January 1955 and in a week or so I was about to start school at the kindergarten of a convent preparatory school in Birmingham. My years there, up until 1961, were amongst the unhappiest of my life. I had spent a carefree term in the nursery class at Abbey Road Juniors where my only memories are of seeing my name printed in big, black letters on a strip of card, and my taking in the shape the letters made, and of being put to bed in the afternoons for a nap. I am assuming it was carefree because the memories are so scant and the ones that remain are pleasant. Just before I left, the namecard came apart in the middle. What I find most significant about this is that I was not afraid of the consequences.

My mother had talked about my new school in hushed, reverential tones. ‘Oh, you’ll learn how to speak properly,’ whereupon she would launch into an awful attempt at a middle-class, English accent, thick with snobbery: ‘You’ll be mixing with doctors’ daughters and the like.’ I was uncomfortable with her talking in this way and even then saw it as some sort of betrayal. Clearly the way we spoke and the fact that I was a builder’s daughter meant that I was quite simply not good enough, so I started that school ashamed of who I was.

On the day my own daughter started school, she took a couple of cuddly toys with her and her teacher said, ‘Now, where would they like to sit?’ I couldn’t help but compare this to the reception I imagined I would have got on my first day if I had had the temerity to bring such a thing with me. I imagine it being slapped from my hands and being told in a loud and angry voice that this was a place for learning.

I have a very clear memory of that first day. I was to be taken to school by the older sister of one of Kevin’s best friends. Her name was Mary and she lived about three hundred yards from our house. Her mum, a small, dark, sharp-featured woman from Northern Ireland, my mother’s friend from St Gregory’s church, ran a clothing catalogue whereby people could order clothes and pay for them in weekly instalments. Every Monday night I was dispatched to pay our instalment, or the ‘club money’ as it was called. Her dad was usually there, ensconced in his armchair in front of the television. He was from Southern Ireland and was much older than his wife; where she appeared harder in both accent and attitude, he was soft and gently spoken. When I was very small he would take me on his knee and tell me stories of fairies and elves and enchanted horses, in a dark, dramatic voice that could make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but he would always end in a burst of laughter and a rough, bristly cuddle.

I loved these Monday nights; I would be sat down in front of the television and given tea in a china cup and saucer, plus a piece of fruit cake, while I watched
Bonanza
, a Western series about an improbable family. I don’t remember their own children, of which there were three, being there very much; they were that much older than me and were most probably either off out having a life or in another room doing their homework. In fact I can remember feeling disappointed if any of the children were there because their mum and dad might have been distracted from their pampering of me. They were a couple whose emotional dynamic was similar to that of my parents, except that they seemed to have more time and were less stressed.

Mary was their middle child, about seven or eight years older than me, with an older sister and a younger brother, and she was a pupil at the senior school, next door to the prep. She was a pretty girl with long dark hair and a massive amount of good sense. The journey to school consisted in part of a fifteen-minute bus ride down towards the city centre. On that first morning I was just about to step down from the bus at the stop by the school when, with a sweep of her arm, Mary pushed me aside and leapt from the bus. Then with one foot still on the platform and the other on the kerb, and the palm of her hand pressed firmly into my chest to stop me getting off, she stood in the path of a speeding bicycle, thus preventing what might have been a rather nasty collision. Instead she struck a pose like Super-woman, straddling the space between bus and pavement, while the cyclist, with a long skid and a squeaking of brakes, ended up with the unseemly parking of his front wheel between her legs and his handlebars pressed hard up against her tightly belted, regulation, navy-blue, gabardine mac. I can still see his head and shoulders shoot forward with the force of stopping so suddenly, causing his Brylcreem-laden quiff to flop down, in what looked like slow motion, over his forehead. Mary then held the cyclist there, their faces just inches apart, while she waved me and several other passengers safely off the bus behind her. Words were exchanged between her and the young man but I cannot remember what they were, except that his were said with an angry scowl, culminating in ‘Fuck off!’ What I do know is that, without a doubt, she came off best.

After this act of bravery I was in complete awe of her. She was a heroine, a person in whose company I was not fit to be, and I rarely dared to speak a word to her on our subsequent journeys. On many an occasion, I even put up with her spitting on her handkerchief and then roughly cleaning my face with it, enduring the unpleasant smell of dried spit until I could get to a tap to wash it off, rather than hint that I might prefer her not to do it. So I was not a little relieved when at six years old I was allowed to travel to and from school by myself.

This went without a hitch until one afternoon in year six, my final year at the school. I was with my two best friends and the little sister of one of them. We had been waiting for the number 9 bus and, feeling a bit bored, we decided to play in the huge overgrown front garden of an enormous empty house that was next to the bus stop. All the houses along this stretch of road were massive and had been converted into either hotels or offices. After some time we heard a man’s voice shouting at us and coming towards us, through the bushes, from the direction of the house.

‘Oi! What do you think you’re doing?’

We decided to run for it and scampered out of the garden, a way down the road, into the front garden of another huge house and there we hid in the bushes. We crouched down, hoping the man had gone, but a few minutes later he reappeared. He was tall and thin, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a grubby-looking mac.

‘What do you think you were doing in that garden?’

I don’t know who said what, but I think we probably all spoke at once.

‘We were just playing.’

‘We’re really sorry.’

He told us to stand up and proceeded to put a clammy hand up each of our skirts in turn and to feel the tops of our thighs. Whilst doing this he asked us what school we went to, this simple question striking more fear into our hearts than the molestation that was taking place. Suddenly he said that he was going but that he would be back in a couple of minutes and then, jabbing his forefinger at us, he told us we were to stay put until he came back or else. We stood there for several minutes in silence, precious minutes during which we could easily have escaped, but we were doing as we were told out of total fear. I can still smell the damp earth and the rotting leaves around our feet, and I can recall wanting this man to be harmless and telling the others in a frightened whisper that I believed his touching us up was simply him working out our age!

‘What would the nuns say if they knew what you’d been up to?’ He was back again and strangely breathless.

‘Oh, please don’t report us! We won’t do it again.’

‘Well, you’d better come with me.’

And dutifully with hearts racing, we followed. He took us back the way we had come, past the disused house and garden where we had been playing and where several people were now waiting for the bus. We then went round the corner into a much quieter road. He took us a little way down it and then instructed us to stand against the wall and lift our dresses up. I can still see his face as he stared at us and my recollecting with horror that not only was I not wearing my school beret, a reportable offence, but that I was also not wearing my regulation navy-blue interlock-weave school knickers. Instead I had on a pair of shameful, pink nylon frilly ones that my mother had bought off the market. After several seconds of staring, he was clearly becoming agitated and took us back the way we had come, up the road and round the corner, where now there was quite a queue at the bus stop. On seeing these people, one of my friends, God bless her presence of mind, suddenly proclaimed, ‘Oh! I’ve got to go and get my bus now.’ And she ran off at top speed in the opposite direction.

This of course attracted the attention of the people in the queue. The man, then clearly panicking, said, ‘Yes . . . yes . . . off you go and don’t let me catch you playing in that garden again or I’ll smack yer bums.’ And with that he scuttled off.

We never used that bus stop again, preferring to walk a quarter of a mile to the next one; nor did we ever speak of the incident. I never told my parents. I didn’t want them to worry and I felt them to be powerless. The next day at school the girl who had run off didn’t turn up. I was in a complete haze of fear the whole morning until her bright little face appeared around the classroom door. She had been to the dentist. I have often wondered what would have happened if that bus stop had been deserted. The man was obviously looking for somewhere to take us and that empty old house would have been perfect if it weren’t for the people waiting for the bus outside it. I also think that if we hadn’t been so terrified of being reported to the school, we’d have been more inclined both to stand up for ourselves and to get away from this man, and that we might not have been so afraid to report him.

The school was situated in a middle-class residential road, full of large detached houses. It was a neat-looking, biscuit-coloured, brick building, consisting of two wings at the centre of which was the chapel. One wing was the school itself and the other was the nuns’ living quarters.

There was no playground as such; we would be sent out to play on the drive or sometimes, as a special treat, ‘down the field’. The field was a green area at the back of the school that stretched a couple of hundred yards down to the perimeter fence, the other side of which was the Edgbaston reservoir. It was not a playing field; there were the odd few trees scattered here and there, and the grass was patchy and rough. No sports were ever taught or played there, although I do seem to remember the odd beanbag being flung about. So weather permitting, at lunchtime and at mid-morning break we were sent out on to the drive to play. Alongside it was a strip of lawn, about the same width as the drive itself, running along underneath the classroom windows and bordered by a concrete kerb. Upon this grass we were forbidden to tread. Many a child, myself included, had been summarily thrashed about the legs for simply letting the back of a heel touch it. So when I visited the school almost thirty years later I was filled with devilment to find that piece of lawn still there.